A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Tietzmann, Roberto; Gross Furini, Liana Article Sharing without laws: an exploration of social practices and ad hoc labeling standards in online movie piracy Internet Policy Review Provided in Cooperation with: Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), Berlin Suggested Citation: Tietzmann, Roberto; Gross Furini, Liana (2016) : Sharing without laws: an exploration of social practices and ad hoc labeling standards in online movie piracy, Internet Policy Review, ISSN 2197-6775, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, Vol. 5, Iss. 2, pp. 1-15, http://dx.doi.org/10.14763/2016.2.416 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/214015 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/de/legalcode www.econstor.eu INTERNET POLICY REVIEW Journal on internet regulation Volume 5 | Issue 2 Sharing without laws: an exploration of social practices and ad hoc labeling standards in online movie piracy Roberto Tietzmann Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Brazil, [email protected] Liana Gross Furini Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Brazil, [email protected] Published on 30 Jun 2016 | DOI: 10.14763/2016.2.416 Abstract: This paper discusses self-labelling standards as sharing mediators in pirated versions of movies available online. Piracy has existed since the beginning of the film industry, challenging established rules and regulations. The dynamics of digital movie piracy often try to meet viewers' expectations while ignoring any regional and premiere date restrictions. Movie piracy organises its abundant offer by generating a self-regulatory repertoire of labeling standards. In this paper we propose an exploration of social practices related to the ad hoc labeling standards as regulators of a presumed user experience in unofficial versions of the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Lessons for sharing economy regulation, especially in contexts where chaotic social relationships are involved, are identified and discussed. Keywords: Sharing economy, Piracy, Peer-to-peer (P2P) Article information Received: 01 Feb 2016 Reviewed: 12 Apr 2016 Published: 30 Jun 2016 Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist that have influenced the text. URL: http://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/sharing-without-laws-exploration-social-practices-and-ad-ho c-labeling-standards Citation: Tietzmann, R. & Gross Furini, L. (2016). Sharing without laws: an exploration of social practices and ad hoc labeling standards in online movie piracy. Internet Policy Review, 5(2). DOI: 10.14763/2016.2.416 This paper is part of Regulating the sharing economy, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by Kristofer Erickson and Inge Sørensen. Internet Policy Review | http://policyreview.info 1 June 2016 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 Sharing without laws: an exploration of social practices and ad hoc labeling standards in online movie piracy INTRODUCTION Unofficial circulation of copyrighted works has always been present in the film industry, occurring in parallel to regular distribution, as Toulet (1995) and Craig (2005) affirm. In the first years of the 21st century, broadband internet and the tools enabled by its ubiquity have shifted some control over the exhibition, availability and programming of films' distribution from producers to the hands of consumers. This handover took the shape of many services, from the online delivery of audiovisual content in different platforms as Cunningham and Silver (2013), Landau (2016), Strangelove (2015) and Ulin (2014) explore, allowing the consumer to tailor the circumstances of exhibition to suit one's needs, to an infrequent dialogue between distributors and audiences, as Furini and Tietzmann (2013) describe. However, as Lessig (2008, p. 28) states about digital networks, “culture in this world is flat; it is shared person to person”. In this context, exchanges tend to be more democratic and horizontal with fluid roles in the process. The contact between these two mindsets and practices -- one managed by producers and distributors offering consumers choice, but wary of losing control over the process -- and the other created on-the-fly by regular people accustomed to sharing goods as easily as one might lend a book or DVD, comes to clash regularly on the internet as cultural habits of sharing are reproduced online. Unauthorised circulation of audiovisual content, usually identified as piracy1 in contemporary media and culture, remains a doppelgänger of regular distribution policies and practices, challenging established rules and regulations and often leading to criminal charges from law enforcement, but also fulfilling audiences´ desires to watch specific content when official channels are not quite able to meet that demand. As audiovisual technologies came closer to consumers´ homes, practices of sharing and piracy found new spaces to thrive. In the 1970s, the possibility to record materials on home video and duplicate them domestically created the notion that these homemade copies were not piracy per se but rather the creation of a personal collection and a possible non-commercial sharing practice among individuals and groups of interest. As Abramson (2002) writes, this first took the shape of discussions on postal communities dedicated to tape trading, an exchange of recordings of television programmes between fans and home video technology enthusiasts that mushroomed after the 1976 release of the Betamax and VHS2 systems. Inside these communities, which soon enough migrated to Usenet3 newsgroups like alt.video.tape-trading among others, users posted and exchanged requests and offers of programmes that could be copied and sent by regular mail to interested parties. In this context, a sense of fair use in these sharing practices prevailed since the amount of copies made by the effort of fans was considerably smaller than the figures of audience of those networks that created the programmes. There sharing practices were no direct threat to the film business itself. Second, the degradation of image and sound on each analog copy generation meant that the experience of watching the show on the main broadcaster could easily be the one that would offer a better experience. Even so, studios were not happy with the possibility of circulation of home recorded tapes, potentially eroding sales, ratings. As a result, they sought compensation. According to Best (1995), the right to make recordings was upheld in a domestic dispute in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982 between Universal Studios and Sony. Later, in 1995, home video hardware Internet Policy Review | http://policyreview.info 2 June 2016 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 Sharing without laws: an exploration of social practices and ad hoc labeling standards in online movie piracy releases like the DVD, created by a consortium after Sony itself became a movie studio - after its purchase of Columbia Pictures in 1988, complicated recording and duplication of content to a point where the copy-and-share functionality of the VHS lost out to the efficiency of DVD copies. Peer-to-peer trading surfaced again after broadband internet became widely available, in the 1990s. Early peer-to-peer networks emphasised the social aspects of sharing in their architecture and purpose. According to Lessig (2008) this reinforces the concept known as sharing economy, where access to cultural material depends not only on commercial issues, but also on social relations. To Shirky (2010), the cost of sharing affects how much content is going to be transmitted. The easier a piece of content is to share, the more people it is likely to reach. Along the same line, Jenkins, Ford and Green (2013) corroborate that certain characteristics can increase the spreadability of a given piece of content, such as its availability at a time and place where audiences want it, portability, reusability, relevance to multiple audiences and its position in a steady stream of material. The potential for networked sharing of cultural expressions increased with the spread of personal computers in the 1980s and the constant improvement of storage and processing of multimedia content in the following decades, finally coming